I'm knitting again...

These are scrap yarn footies made from the left-overs from all those socks I knitted for Christmas presents three or four years ago. After Fern shrunk the wool+bamboo pair I just finished (to a size a four-year-old could wear), I had to make another pair with a blend that won't shrink.

These are the first socks I've made toe-up. I used a provisional cast-on and a short-row toe, both firsts for me. I like learning new things, keeps me young. Right? My daughter's ice skating coach thought I was 39. Love her.

I have too many unfinished quilts to be back into knitting. Oh well. I'll get tired of this soon.

Probably right before that large ebay order of yarn arrives. Right?
 

Weekend Stuff

The weekend ended with more rain. We had gotten 5.12 inches from Wednesday evening to Friday morning. Saturday and Sunday were pretty, but the rain started right after I filled the tank on the ride back from Winchester and the rain gauge collected another half inch over night.

Fern and her boyfriend and I went out to Winchester for my mom's art show reception. She didn't know we were coming, it was a nice surprise. My mom has been a member of the Blandy Sketch Group (not just for sketchers) for several years now and they have an annual show of members works.

Something has happened to Fern. I'm not complaining, I've just noticed. I think maybe her "terrible teens" years are over, or in remission. She's been pleasant, I've been getting hugs, she's not defiant, and she wanted to go to see her grandmother, whereas in the past, no way, "Grandma's weird…do we have to?" And, she wanted to take the BF with us. When we got home she said he had a good time and wanted to go back.

The rest of the weekend was boring, I got 5½ loads of laundry done (the other half load is still in the dryer). I got caught up on some of my shows on the DVR, but now have Amazing Race from last night to watch. I did watch a lot of the Ryder Cup over the weekend, too. Oh, speaking of golf, I bought a new set of woman's irons last weekend and tried them out on Saturday. Not good. I need to break them in before I play with them.

Maybe I'll try to post more often, work is in my busy season so no promises.

Embedded Links

It's been so long since I posted anything of substance.

I'm not sure the following could be considered "substance" or not, however.

Friday 7/9, Kevin, with his Special Olympics swim team, were honored at the Bowie Baysox game. They got a pre-game introduction, two guys got to throw out the first pitches, and many team members got to run out to the bases with the team. Kevin got to run out to second base. He stood there during the National Anthem, then sauntered back while the rest of the kids ran. That's my boy.




All the fertile office co-worker's wives have given birth and I'm still working on the last baby quilt. I have 10% of the blocks done (of 20) so I have a long way to go.

I'm trying to stay on top of the laundry instead of leaving something in the washer for a couple days or having two or three baskets of things that never got folded while warm and now need to be re-fluffed.

The kids have been back from camp for over a week now and I'm almost done with their laundry. The Boy brought back some clothes with someone else's name written inside. I still need to put them in the post.

I've been listening to BBC/Radio 1 a lot via the Internet and satellite radio in the new car. The Internet plays in real time, but Sirius time-delay's the show by five hours. Kinda messes with the mind a bit.

Wednesday 7/7 was our twentieth anniversary. Dan and I took the day off from work and played golf, then had dinner at Cityzen downtown at the Mandarin Hotel. Yum.

I took a golf lesson Saturday morning from Troy Beck. I'd totally lost the ability to hit fairway woods from the fairway and wasn't getting any real distance from my longer irons. She said I was standing up too soon because I was off balance, and that I was crowding my hands/arms. She had me stand farther back from the ball and gave me drills to practice keeping balanced. By the end of the lesson I was getting 125 yards out of my 7 wood!

It rained 1.38" on Saturday.

Back in June I went to Columbus/OSU for a Perl conference. Perl is a programming language, not a misspelled adornment. I was born and went to college not an hour away from Columbus in Urbana. Some of my college friends were still in the area so I had an opportunity to catch up with some of them. I had lunch with Piper who had lived in the dorm room across the hall from me and is now working in Columbus.

One night I drove out to Urbana and met up with Martha and David at the college. It's really a university now, but I'm having a hard time changing the name in my mind. We walked around campus remarking on all the changes made in the last thirty years and reminiscing about fellow students. My grandmother taught biology and botany there and had her lab/classroom and office in a lovely old building, Barkley-Baily Hall, which since has been turned in to plain classrooms, probably in the English department. The college built a new science/math building in which my grandmother is supposed to have a memorial classroom, but Martha hadn't seen it on a previous visit and I didn't look for it myself. While I was in town, I also drove past my grandparents old house and visited them at the cemetery.

I was supposed to meet up with another friend, but she didn't make it back into town in time. I was bummed. I hadn't seen her in years.

Fern went to ice skating camp for a week and came back pretty jazzed to skate at Worlds in Boston at the end of the month. Now she has a week to cram in all the lessons she can before she competes. Most of her events have seven girls in them. I sure hope she does better than last, I don't want her to be devastated and quit skating. She's so beautiful when she skates and I'm thrilled she has an activity she enjoys. She's been working at the snack bar at the pool and loves having a paycheck. She hates her bank because they are never open when I can get her there to cash the check. Should I let her get an ATM card?

I tried three times to get the new iPhone software to download before it was successful. The download took over 75 minutes each time and process would die with 5 minutes to go. I don't have the new iPhone 4 but I got many of the new features on my 3Gs with this download. Some of the new features are quirky and I'm still trying to figure them out. Oh well. I'd love to be a product test for Apple.

My brother and Roseanne finally opened their yarn shop in Culpeper, VA. I guess I need to visit sometime, huh?


Oh, that's enough rambling for now.

Weekend Round-up, Among OtherThings

I'm not usually one of those moms that dash off to the ER at the sight of blood, but when the sight of blood wasn't ending, I took The Boy in. I knew there was nothing to stitch up, since the edge of his left index finger was gone, but I knew I couldn't stop the bleeding by myself. He was cutting salami.

Dan was in Tampa for the weekend golfing with his friends.

I did a lot of laundry this weekend. The last load is in the dryer right now. It's the "everything else" load. Usually I pick through what is on the floor of the laundry room to make a load of like items, darks, pastels, colors, whites, towels. The "everything else" load is the stuff that falls through, the stuff that doesn't pass muster on previous sorting rounds. It's the load you hate to put away because it's usually a bunch of mismatched socks and shirts that are too small for your youngest child. You know. I'll have that load waiting for me tonight. Oh joy.

Lost is back tomorrow night after a nine-month hiatus. I gotta make sure the DVRs are set. Yes, both of them. I started a Lost marathon yesterday by rewatching season 5. This interrupted a Lois & Clark season 1 marathon and ended up being interrupted by watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days because we wanted to send it back to Netflix.

I found Season 1 of Lois and Clark on eBay for The Girl (and myself!) because I enjoyed it 16 years ago and thought she might like it, too. "Like it" turned out to be an understatement. She loves it and thinks Dean Cain is wonderful, gorgeous, and very good-looking. He was quite yummy in that show, wasn't he? I found Season 2 on eBay and she had that watched in a heartbeat. Now she's dying to have Seasons 3 and 4, but I can't find them as cheaply as I found 1 & 2 and I'm not willing to pay $61 per season at Borders, or even $40 at Amazon. She'll get her homework done and I'll keep looking for bargains online.

I've had 21 Girl Scout vests to work on this month. I didn't think my stack would ever diminish, but it's down and I now have only four to go, then it's back to personal sewing/quilting. Yay.

The quilt retreat is coming up at the end of next week so I've made a list of projects to take with me. It's a small list, only ten or twelve things. Sheesh. I probably ought to take my ritalin with me so I can stay focused and not get overwhelmed. And get stuff done. There are three guys in my office whose wives are due with babies and I've promised them all baby quilts. Silly me. The nice thing about baby quilts is that you can make them small and no one will complain.

I ordered a portable sewing machine table with some birthday and badge-sewing money. It should be here in time for the retreat. This new table will make it easier to do machine quilting at retreat, where it was impossible before because the table was not flush with the bed of the sewing machine.

Since I haven't had a proper blog post in a while, I'd better stop here. I can't give away all my secrets at once, and, I still have real work to do even though the crush is (almost) past.



 

The Good News

Well, the good news is: I got a load of underwear done before the washer died.


 

Lost Weekend

Kevin was up past 3:00 Saturday night.
And let us know about it.
Sheesh.

Sometime after 2:00 I promised him Five Guys after church if he'd just go to bed. Eventually he did.

I knew he'd take a nap when we got home from Five Guys which would then push his bed time back to some ungodly hour, again. I hate that.

Time for a preemptive strike. I camped out on my bed, where he like to take his naps, and attacked the backlog of laundry, matching socks and stacking underwear, while watching episodes of Lost on DVD. Every once in a while I'd hand him a stack of something to put away and he finally gave up on the nap idea and played computer games, instead.

I started at the beginning of season one of Lost since I hadn't seen it in a while. If you keep up with the show, you know we've learned things this season that blow "normal" TV out of the water. If the series hadn't done that already. So yesterday, I watched the first five or six episodes and I noticed that all those early comments, seemingly innocent at the time, have deeper meanings and are clues for the future. It's just like reading all the Harry Potter books over again after you've learned the end of the story and all those clues Harry and gang glossed over in the early years pop out at you like someone took a highlighter and marked up your books.

I started to head downstairs around dinner time but got shooed back up. I was served surf and turf dinner "in bed" and then I finally came downstairs for real to watch the Survivor finale at 8:00.

Kevin did have somewhat of a normal bed time, about 11:30, so the strategy worked for the most part. And, this is the bonus part, he won't (oughtn't) have that domino effect tonight and take a nap as soon as he gets home from after-care. He's off to high school in the fall and they have a start time of 7:30 which means he'll have to get up an hour earlier. Yikes. We'll have all summer to practice getting up early, right?

Aye Yi Yi

I had a doctor's appointment this morning to have a pain in my neck checked. No, not Fern, but I will discuss her later. I have pain in a gland on the right side that I've had for a long time. While I was there I got to donate blood for routine lab work. Except the donation part was not routine. The first lab tech finally found a vein that she could use in the right arm, but it kept rolling and she couldn't get the needle all the way in so she tried a vein in the back of my hand, again with no luck.

At this point I'm feeling very faint, after all, this is for fasting tests. The first vampire leaves and a second vampire comes in. More tourniquets, more prodding and she finally finds a usable vein on the left arm.
The lights are almost out in the room, it's very dark and I'm not sure how she could see to get all three vials of blood. After a short nap, the lights are back on and I prepare to leave. But, wait, that's not all, can you leave a sample in there, too? sheesh. How much more do I need to give here for a pain in the neck? In addition to the referral to the ENT guy, I asked for two other referrals, one for a beloved mammo and one to a psychiatrist so I can get meds for my ADD. My doctor doesn't know which doctor to send me to because a lot of them are not taking my insurance anymore. I guess psychiatrists don't want to help people who cannot pay to see them.

Before my trip to the doctor's office I had time to fold up a load of laundry that was partly a load I started mixed in with a load the princess started (princess said with the utmost contempt, by the way). There are three baskets of clean unfolded laundry around the washer. The princess, it seems, will start a load of her clothes for school and, when it's time to put them in the dryer, will move anything already occupying the space in a basket and leave it there, cold, wrinkled, and unwearable. Three baskets full. Sometimes I can fluff the unwearables back to life in the dryer along with a wet towel, sometimes they are just too far gone. I gave the princess a piece of my mind, you have to fold what's in the dryer, now I have three baskets to deal with, you can't just leave it there..... sheesh. Think she'll remember next time? I doubt it, too.

I don't have to worry about clean pants for a while. I got my order from LL Bean the other day. I have a hard time finding pants that fit me because my hip-to-waist ratio is so big and my legs are so long. If I find a pair of pants in a department store that seem to fit and seem to be long enough, they never are after washing and drying. on LOW heat mind you; they're 2" too short. sheesh. I need to gather them all up and give them to AM, her legs are shorter than mine. LL Bean sells long pants and promises they won't shrink. I ordered four pairs. Yesterday I wore the cotton chinos in "soapstone" and promptly dropped food on them. This, of course, is after I spoke to the aforementioned princess about wearing pants more than once before she puts them in the hamper. sheesh. Today I'm wearing "rosette" Adirondack jeans. And look! no spots!

How is your day?

About 7:05 pm last night my lights went out for a second, then came back on and I heard a bang from across the neighborhood. Then they went out again. There were thunder storms in the area but nothing really close, so it was a surprise, really, we lost power.

Kevin was cool about the lights. Fern's iPod had power so he hung out in her room with the music and the battery speakers. Good thing she wasn't home.

There is something pleasant, comforting, about the quiet house, no droning TV, no humming AC compressor, and the porch door open with the breeze blowing the trees outside, no washing machine agitating, no dryer tumbling, no laundry getting done mere days before the kids go off to camp. Sheesh.

There were 92 pairs of underwear in a recent load of laundry I did. Then I found another basket of socks I never matched and found enough underwear in there to bring the total up to 120 fresh clean pairs in my house.

Why on earth did I count them? I don't know. Once I saw those stacks growing... I guess I just felt compelled to count.

I will not count the matched socks.

I won't.